The grassy slopes of the hill bore a hideous carpet of thousands of
German dead, over which new forces still advanced with the same madness
of sacrifice as the Carthaginians of old, flinging their children,
their possessions, and themselves into Moloch's furnace. The bloody
religion of militarism that Germany has followed for forty years has
led its votaries to culminating orgies of destruction.
But the defenders are not appalled by the fury of the struggle, nor by
numbers. Each position is held until every foot of ground has been paid
for by German blood. Again and again a swift counterattack, delivered
at the right moment, has wrested from the assailant the fruits of the
success he won so dearly and forced him to pay a toll of lives twice
over. In the villages thus retaken, the poilus say, gray-clad corpses
lay heaped up as though they had been collected for a gigantic funeral
pyre, and more than once the advancing enemy was screened from the
defenders' fire by a rampart of his own dead.
The general situation of the battle has changed little. In the centre
the French have retired slightly. On the left also there is a southward
bulge in the line. The right is still held by a wooded massif above
Drelincourt. On the right the towers of Noyon Cathedral could just be
distinguished. To the left smoke haze marked Lassigny, half hidden in a
hollow. It was a natural fortress with an infinity of cover for guns,
men, and machine guns against which no fury of sacrifice might prevail.
Well may the Germans try to turn that grim salient by an advance
further south in the centre--clearly their immediate objective. They
held it once before last year's retreat and they know its strength.
As I returned from the observation post I passed through a great
natural amphitheatre in a sort of mountain. At one side the Germans
had carved a huge eagle, colored blood red, on a slab of rock above
a grotto that had been their headquarters. Beneath it in Gothic
letters was the Brandenburg motto, "On, Brandenburg, on!" The artist
who designed the bird that is the symbol of German violence was well
inspired. The Kaiser's eagles are red, indeed, clotted and stained from
beak to claw with the crimson of countless slaughters.
The latest information from the battlefront emphasizes still more
clearly the difference between the results of the new German method
of attack when applied on a weakly held sector and a front where the
allied strength is normal. On two previous occasions Hindenburg's storm
divisions gained sensational success right from the outset by literally
swamping small forces by sheer weight after the defenders had been
half-stunned by the terrific bombardment to which their inferiority of
artillery permitted no adequate response.
Conditions are very different today. In the first place there was no
strategic surprise--the German move in this sector had been foreseen.
The utmost vigilance was everywhere maintained, and unmistakable signs,
such as the movement of troops, convoys, and artillery registration,
had been carefully noted. Precautions to meet the shock had been taken.
Against attack in depth by successive waves a depth defense had been
planned, with a front line of thinly held outposts to minimize loss,
and successive lines of greater strength extending back for kilometers.
When the German artillery storm broke out it was answered by a perfect
hurricane of French fire. Not only was every possible point where
the enemy troops might advance or batteries be hidden thoroughly
registered, but artillery held in reserve had its guns trained on
targets offered further in the rear by each hill, wood, or valley that
the enemy might assail as a vantage point or medium for infiltration.
The consequence has been that, in direct contradiction to the former
drives, the enemy's initial losses have been enormous and his gains
small; and the French losses were greatly decreased. Above all, there
has been no penetration of the line of resistance. In places it bulged
slightly under pressure, but only at the price of the most dogged
fighting and heavy sacrifice, and withal very slowly. One fact marks
the difference sufficiently: